During VMworld Europe 2011, held in Copenhagen, I was able to see a preview of the new upcoming features of Veeam Backup & Replication 6.

Besides the already known support for Hyper-V, the most important news are coming once again for the VMware platform. Here and in some following articles, I will explore the main news.

Scalability

Even if in the past Veeam was already excellent in performances, an implementation in large infrastructures could not avoid to use different parallel installation of BR V5. That’s because every installation had inside all the software modules: job scheduler, data retrieval from storage and saving, all made by the same server.

With version 6, these 3 roles can be installed separately, and on different servers, like in this graphic:

This new feature will allow to create configuration where, using a single Backup Server, responsible for job management and load balancing (details in the end of the article), we will use several Proxy Servers, in order to dramatically reduce backup times on huge volumes of data, to send them to specific Repository Servers.

Load Balancing: backup server will distribute jobs among the Proxy Servers non using a simple round robin, but evaluating datastores connections, loads on the proxies and job schedules.

This new architecture, together with an improvement in the usage of ESXi hosts ant their performances (a mandatory step since the end of full ESX in vSphere 5), will allow to design even bigger backup environments, to manage them in an optimized way, avoiding one of the problem of Veeam BR5, the so called “backup storm”, where an excessive number of backup jobs could saturate the source storage.